Slashdot Mirror
Cryptome Log Subpoenaed
PaulBu writes "Stopped by on Cryptome tonight... It seems that their logs have been subpoenaed by Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General
Chief, Corruption, Fruad (sic) &
Computer Crime Division. Cryptome's answer was that "logs of
Cryptome are deleted daily, or more often during heavy traffic, to
protect the privacy of visitors to the site." (Good job!)
See here"
Looks like they're going to be doing a lot of deleting now ;)
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Coming soon: legislation requiring access to any U.S. hosted site to be logged and stored for at least 72 hours.
The constitution protects criminals also.
This is a fundamental problem with freedom. If you want freedom, your neighbor has to expect that same freedom, even if he is a bigger criminal than you.
Of course, everyone is a felon. Most people just haven't pissed off the correct person yet.
Not that I support the government's position on this: "It's secret - national security, you know. Nothing to see here, move along."
I'm glad that Cryptome deletes log files. Though most here probably support Cryptome's stance, I doubt that today's slashdotting is going to be welcome.
I'll bite.
/. effect is already in force so I can't get to the article, so I can't help but wonder if theres an actual criminal investigation that these logs were needed for, or if they're looking to start one from those logs. If it is an ongoing investigation, what information would be gleaned from those logs that would possibly be helpful to them? That the person in question reads cryptome?
Who exactly are the criminals they are protecting here? people like me who read the site? Did someone pass a law while I was sleeping: "Thou Shalt Not Read Cryptome"?
This kind of behavior should definitely be considered a "chilling effect". The
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
i work with the local indypendent media center and our solution was to not log the ip addresses. the logs are still useful for diagnosing problems, but without the ip addresses they are useless for finding people.
-- john
How does one subpoena a log file? I imagine the conversation went something like this:
"We have a summons for your log file."
"Uh, would you like us to send an admin to court with the log files?"
"No, just tell the log file to show up in court on the date indicated on the summons."
This will be interesting...
http://130.236.229.26/cryptome-log.htm
You mean like this?
We, as true Americans, aren't obligated to collect and archive every little drop of information about ourselves, our neighbors, and our customers on the off chance that it may someday be useful to law enforcement in solving or preventing a crime. Especially when you consider that the potential for abuse of randomly-collected information is much higher than the potential for its utility.
As has been said elsewhere, if they deleted the logs regularly (i.e., not in response to a subpoena), it would be hard to pin "obstruction of justice" on them. Naturally, IANAL and all that. But that would be like pinning an obstruction charge on a janitor for sweeping the hallways like she does every night because this time some evidence was swept up.
I read this story on Cryptome before the /. effect took hold -- what happened is some jerkoff is sending around fake emails with forged headers which purport to come from a legit company essentially trying to extort money from people to keep their personal data private. Obviously, the DA has a suspect and a grand jury has been empaneled to try to indict the guy behind the joe job, and they are hoping that the perp has been accessing the cryptome site (less likely, but possible, is that it's a fishing expedition and they will simply check everybody who surfed that page during the timeframe in question). The story has almost nothing to do with the true mission of the cryptome site. As far as posting the subpoena, there is a clear notice on the cryptome site declaring their intention to post the contents of all such legal notices unless it is illegal for John Young (a resident of New York IIRC) to post them.
When I used to work at an ISP, whenever we were summonsed for log files they'd always be for records that were weeks or months old. Most of them were from the "CyberSmuggling" division of US Customs.
Right now I maintain a high traffic site that doesn't store more than 4 days worth of logs on each web server (each day is about 2GB). One time they subpeona'd us for logs that were literally 3 months old. Hah.
about 1/2 way down the page you get the gist they were looking for anyone who visited the page http://cryptome.org/sec-con.htm
Of course, the page was taken down / slashdotted, I guess. Google to the rescue!
DSL-Admin, are you trying to tell me that you could not judge a barrel of apples without at least a single rotten one in it? "I don't know if these apples are good or not; there's nothing to compare them to!"
Light/dark, good/evil: they are NOT opposite sides of the same coin, no matter what Superfriends or the Masters of the Universe taught you.
BADNESS isn't something in its own right that must "balance" goodness, as if "too much" goodness would be a bad(!) thing. QED.
You'd probably say that if everything in the world were red, there'd be no color in the world.
(I think IHBT)
You havn't ever actually maintained a web site, have you?
Logs typically get compressed nightly, and deleted frequently.
I've maintained sites that literally filled GBs of disk with log data. And it gets much more expensive (CPU cost) to process huge files. Typically, you end up picking some time frame which you compress the files at, and maintain a regular deletion cycle.
Of course you would also create reports for management and marketing, but those reports contain very few specific details like IPs, and lots of details about counts per page/directory/product item.
You really can't maintain an interesting site without frequent log deletion. I'm surprised they took the "protect the privacy of our users" route- it would be a Bad Thing [TM] to have someone get a court ruling made that websites must save all logs for a period of 5 years or something equally insane.
Anyone worth their salt who is doing anything bad is using a proxy anyway.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
vi /var/log/httpd/smokinggun.log[ENTER]
256iwww.ago.state.ma.us[ENTER]
[ESC]
[SHIFT+z]z[SHIFT+z]
Ahh, Sir! Here I've got it, see? '/var/log/httpd/smokinggun.log'!
Eh, ahum...
giel.y contains 2 shift/reduce conflicts
CustomLog | /bin/mail subpoena@ago.state.ma.us
:)
this could take a while
Hammer of Truth
I am not sure where "Maeryk" is located, but in the United States, this is 100% untrue: "freedoms granted by the government"
The US Government does NOT grant freedoms. The people have them by RIGHT. The people have granted (albeit altered by judicial fiat) the *government* limited, enumerated powers. That is all.
PEOPLE are NOT agents of the government and are therefore NOT REQUIRED TO TRACK OTHER PEOPLE. That is a police state, a la the Soviet Union et al.
Regarding this:
"You cant have the freedoms granted by the government (laughable as they may be at times) without also following whatever rules make those freedoms a reality.
i know i'm coming in way late here, but JYA pays for cryptome traffic out of pocket. it's his hobby (or mission, the point is that he doesn't get recompensated for it).
so don't lay waste to his site if you don't have an interest. it's coming straight out of his wallet.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
That is just appalling: "If you are worried about your IP being logged when you get into a server or access online content, dont get online."
Have you ever heard of 'chilling effects'? Do you have any idea just how noxious this idea is to freedom? One of our fundamental principles has always been that you are free to think and read anything you wish; that information (with a very, very few exceptions) should not be suppressed in this country. No matter how noxious the current government may find the spread of some ideas, some of them are undoubtedly going to be right. There is little that makes authority figures more uncomfortable than the truth.
And finally.... freedoms ARE NOT GRANTED BY THE GOVERNMENT. I hope you're not a US citizen... if you are, you should just pack up and move to China. Government can only grant privileges. You have rights, many of which are enumerated in the Constitution (but it was never meant to be an exhaustive list) that cannot be taken away by the government. Instead, we grant the government certain limited powers which it uses on our behalf for the greater good.
They work for US, we don't work for THEM. The fact that you could be mixed up on this issue is scary. The fact that you could be modded up to +5 is even more frightening. What the hell is going on in this country??
and if you are worried about government comming down on you for speaking out ...
don't speak out
sorry but that is ridiculous reasoning.
Jonathan
Not it wasn't. 9/11 was a direct result of US foreign policy, most of which the US population is completely obvious to. They don't teach it in school, and there aren't any movies about it, so you can all be forgiven for this lack of knowledge. More so now that Bush has flat out lied to you and said the old classic "they hate freedom and democracy".
The USA (amoung other countries) has started, aided and funded coups and wars that resulted in democratically elected governments being replaced with ruthless dictators. Who do you think got Saddam into power? Then sold him masses of tanks and the equipment to build weapons of mass distruction (the idea being he'd be attacking the Iranians)? Who is aiding Israel in the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinions from their own homes? Who put the vicious Saudi government in power, and is defending them right now with your tanks, troops and finances? This is what the terrorists don't like, and they have said this many times.
If you want to stop terrorists attacking you, first learn what is being done in your name around the world, then let your politicions know that you aren't happy with them killing children to secure better access to oil, for the benefit of their corporate "sponsors". It's a much cleaner solution that asking for log file retention.
1) if I have a client request a restore of backed-up data, I bill them T&M for the procedure (especially if tapes have to be retrieved from off-site storage). Does the government ever pay for such a service?
2) If I'm subpoenaed, to what effort do I have to go to make the data usable to the prosecutor? Can I hand over a DLT? Can I print out the log files and hand over multiple reams of paper? Can I provide them the data on media without an obligation to provide them hardware to read that media (say, a really old syquest)?
This subpoena says "bring with him/her all logs recording the I.P. addresses and/or users who visited" but makes no mention of an obligation to provide them in the format most usable to the AG.
And a third thought, I'm curious as to how a Facsimile was delivered to a voice number :-)
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Sue your teachers.
There is, at its heart, no difference between philosophy and politics.
A government which infringes on basic human rights loses its legitimacy. Ergo the founding of our republic. Need I refer you to the source material?
You are saying that there is no arguing with whatever is written in whatever document is held to be the law of the land. However, our history tells us otherwise. Common sense, and a shared sense of basic principles overrides any governmental decree.
You may claim this means moral relativism, or leads to anarchy, but yet I am right, and it has not. Rather, it led to the founding of our country. The principles and mechanisms by which such basic priority operates are fluid and unreliable, but the world is not a CPU.
I'll repeat what Malor said, because it's absolutely correct, and understanding its meaning in the very core of your being is essential to your dignity as a human being. "[basic] freedoms ARE NOT GRANTED BY THE GOVERNMENT."
I'll reiterate my earlier point, because I can already hear the pedants clawing at their cages. This does not mean moral relativism. Just merely that we are never "bound" in any legal sense by a "government" which infringes on basic human rights which have been held, across most of earth's cultures, to be fundamental and universal. If you want to pretend there is no agreement on what a human right is, don't waste our time, or pretend it matters that there is no absolute agreement. Take a look at, for instance, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights if you're confused.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Well, approximately 200 years of constitutional jurisprudence and the 10th Amendment disagree with your position, so I guess it's *you* who need to go back to your high school civics class.
The Bill of Rights grants nothing to the People that they did not already have under "natural law" which was the leading theory in legal philosophy at the time. Does the phrase "government of the people, by the people and for the people" mean anything to you? How about "government by the consent of the governed"?
When it was written the framers of the The Bill of Rights couched it ENTIRELY in "reservation of rights" language with the intention of making it crystal clear that these rights were fundamental and that the federal government is prohibited from infringing them. This position is made even more clear by the 10th Amendment which explicitly reserves all rights and powers not expressly granted to the federal government to the States and to the People.
The intention of the framers of the US Constitution was to create a limited government that had only those powers necessary to fulfill its unique functions as a national government and "granting rights" to the people is NOT one of those functions.
If you read the history of the framing of the Bill of Rights, you will discover that there was MAJOR disagreement whether it was even necessary given the fact that the Constitution granted such limited powers to the federal government. However, after a number of the larger states, including Virginia and Massachussetts, made it clear that they would NOT ratify any Constitution that LACKED a Bill of Rights, the delegates to the convention agreed that something akin to the English Declaration of the Rights of Man would not hurt anything (more on this to follow, below).
The difference between the Bill of Rights (which RESERVES rights safe from government interference) and the English Declaration (which does, indeed, grant rights) is that in the US all political power arises from the People, while in England (at least in theory) all power flows from the Crown. This fact lead to the arrogant conduct of George III which led, in turn, to the revolution, and the colonists, having recently wrested liberty from the Crown by force of arms, were not kindly disposed to giving it back to another central government founded on the same principles, ergo a written Constitution was necessary to delineate the limits of government power.
utter rubbish
2. What is Cryptome doing on Verio anyway? It's a filthy spammer host.
John Young has posted quite a lot of information about his log policy before....It's pretty widely known that he deletes them very regularly to prevent this kind of thing.
People have asked why logs aren't just sent to /dev/null - that's because John does scan the logs for "interesting" visitors - see e.g. his previous stories about catching various US departments and agencies (FBI, Whitehouse) looking at his site.
The site is currently down I wonder if it has been slashdotted, or.......
"Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that Mary said, the Feds were sure to know."
Getting off topic here; my original post was to point out the fact that we are attacking the symptoms of a larger problem. Oh well, in for a penny...
9/11 was a direct result of religious whackos hi-jacking planes on suicide missions. Blaming the US is like blaming rape victims for wearing short skirts
Excuse me? Haven't you asked yourself by these terrorists hate America pretty much exclusively? Not Canada, Austrailia, pretty much all of Europe, who all have similar ideals and economic and political to the USA. Why is that? It certainally doesn't tie in with the "freedom and democracy hating" nonsence we are being fed.
All the US wants is for other countries to be free so they'd buy more goods and services
Bin Laden has gone on record stating that his aim is to remove the US troops from Saudi Arabia. The troops there are backing up a dictatorship government, hated by most of the people. Where does this fit in with your "US wants other countries to be free"? Why have they done the opposite in more places than they have created freedom? I understand that you may actually believe that, given that you probably haven't read much history. You really should try to get out of that self-delusional world though. We aren't the good guys are represented in the movies. Sure, if you spend your whole life watching them, growing up with images of our troops liberating people and Bruce Willis saving the world, but the historical facts do not match that image. Remember, the Nazi's used films of the same type with the same purpose.
As for the terrorists, they have no other recourse, if they complain about their country they disappear, get tortured then are never seen again. They want the freedom we take for granted. Unfortunatly, they have gone down the route of terrorism to attempt to achieve that goal.
The Saudi dictatorship was put in place by a military coup supported by the USA. The democratic government was ousted to make way for one that was more willing to work with the US. Note that the Saudi women are treated exactly the same as the Taliban treated them, yet you don't see a call for a war in Saudi Arabia. However, Afganistan is now being controlled by people who used to work with George Bush in a private company, but yeah!, we went there to free the women, right!?! The recent Afgan war was to remove the Taliban because they weren't giving the US concessions on anything, such as the construction of a pipeline to a neighbouring country with vast oil reserves. The Taliban were friendly with the US for a very long time, the top officials were over in Texas and Washington on many occassions. It is only when the contract to build this pipeline went to Argentina instead, that the Taliban suddenly became "evil" in the public eye. The war in Afganistan had been hinted at prior to 9/11, and using that tragedy as propaganda to have this war is downright disgraceful and an insult to the thousands of innocents who lost their lives that day.
Other examples of immoral acts...how about creating Saddam Hussain? Again, a perfectly valid government was dispossed with US assistance to put him in power. The idea was that he would fight Iran, who were not very friendly to the US. He was supplied with weapons, vast amounts of credit and the equipment to make weapons of mass destruction. Again, the idea was that he would attack Iran. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, they asked the US Ambasidor what their opinion was on the matter, to which they were told that "the US has no opinion on that".
I suggest you learn some world history before engaging in these discussions. History is not what happens in movies, nor is the education received in school of much use. You ain't gonna get this stuff from your leaders either, and more worryingly, the media seem to be "ignoring" it.
This is what pisses me off most about the west, but more so the USA. We claim to be bastions of "freedom", "truth", "democracy", but we live in a place where the goverment can look at your web/e-mail usage (remember Nixon? How could you forget that lesson so soon?), politicions openly lie about the causes of these terrorists (so much for "truth") and where the leadership of a country is controlled by how good their advertising campaign was, funded by private individuals who's interests become a part of national policy.
I put it to you that west as we see it is merely an illusion. We are just as regressive as many of these "evil" countries, and the population is led around using hate and fear. Go watch Bowling for Columbine, although it does focus on the issue of firearms, it makes good points on the use of "fear" in the US (the UK is pretty much the same) as well as some US indiscressions that our leaders would rather you didn't know about.
I'm glad that there are people out there with the same thoughts as me, e.g. Michael Moore, the creator of the above film. The one great thing about our society is that myself and others have the freedom to discuss these issues, without fear of reprisal. Well, guess what...with all this new net monitoring trends, that freedom will soon be gone. Right now, this post will probably be getting modded as "interesting" by these spy systems. And I'll bet that in a few years, people will be afraid to speak their minds on these sort of subjects as it will become a permanent entry on their file, which will give them all sorts of problems getting visa as they may have "terrorist tendancies". Sounds a lot like the Soviet Russia system we were brought up to hate.
So, if you want to shoot me down and stick your head in the sand on this stuff, fine. Don't expect me to be happy about your apathy, and don't come asking for help when pretty much all the freedoms you used to enjoy are gone or you have lost a family member with all the violence going on.
First of all, the document in question is NOT a search warrant, it is a subpoena, which lacks MANY of the protections built into a searchwarrant. In fact, in many jurisdictions, the issuance of a subpoena does not require ANY judicial action or even a sworn statement that supports a finding of probable cause that the material sought is even relevant evidence of the crime under investigation.
In short, this IS a fishing expedition and cryptome SHOULD obtain Massachussetts counsel to put in a "special appearance" to contest the jurisdiction of the Grand Jury over itself and to prosecute a motion to quash the subpoena for lack of 1) personal jurisdiction, and 2) relevance of the logs to the investigation.
utter rubbish
So how likely is it that there's a law in the works somewhere that *requires* you to keep reasonable logs? Especially with all this terrorism stuff about.
Such a requirement would not be considered onerous, and if the logs were gone, the Feds could haul you in for that.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"